Haymarket visit- Dan Hall

My time slot for the site visit was from 8-10 pm Saturday night. I arrived at about 8:15 and was just in time to see the final parts of the cleanup. My initial reaction to arrival on the site was – is this it? I arrived to see empty and dark streets. The smell was very memorable as well – imagine walking in a field of rotten tomatoes and that’s about the scent that was wafting through the air. On Hanover St. a front-end loader was loading the remaining trash from the market into the back of dump trucks that hauled the trash to who knows where. The wheels of the tractors and trucks were spinning on the streets that were slick with a “market slime” concoction. The street was actually a bit slippery to walk on as well. Street sweepers were running up and down Hanover St. behind the tractors as they did the finer cleaning after the bulk trash was hauled away.
All of the overhead doors of the markets on Blackstone St. were closed, and there were several workers hanging out on the sidewalks loading things into and out of trucks and just taking breaks. Blackstone St. was totally deserted except for the above mentioned workers and a few fork-lifts hauling and stacking pallets in the fenced off area inside the jersey barriers.
Pedestrians were moving along Hanover St. and I heard several exclamations of dismay at having to walk through the grime that coated the sidewalks and street. At this point Hanover St. was serving as a thoroughfare between the North End and the restaurants on Union and Marshall St. I spied a few empty orange cartons and some stray ears of corn but the clean-up seemed to be pretty efficient.
I walked behind Haymarket in the back alley that comes out on Creek Square and nothing was going on back there. There were cars parked in a small parking lot behind the back entrances to the markets on Blackstone St. so I assume people were still inside cleaning up. I felt like I was on a movie set in a studio when I walked through the back alley. There was a little bit of a breeze and some paper trash was blowing around like tumbleweed in a western ghost town.
I was also struck by the connection that Hanover St. seemed to provide between the parks in the open space over the rt. 93 tunnels and the North End, and the bustling restaurant and bar scene of Union St. and Congress St. Everybody was using it as the most direct route although they seemed to hurry through Hanover St. not wanting to stay long in the uncomfortable darkness and dirtiness.
Overall the Haymarket that I saw was not a very welcoming place – it was hard to picture the bustling market place that it must be in the daytime. It’s amazing what kind of transformations a flexible space like this can go through.